build and deliver

My development blog - just things that take my fancy or stuff I'm working on.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Book Search in New Zealad

It's been a while since I worked on a new personal project (i.e. not something for a client) but I'm getting ready to launch bookish.co.nz a book price comparison site for New Zealand. I've scoured the web for NZ book sites but please let me know if there are any more you think I should add.

Note: I've got Whitcoulls working and am working on parsing The Warehouse. These are probably the two main bricks and mortar book sellers in NZ.

Friday, August 31, 2007

squidoo

I'm now fiddling with what's possible on squidoo: http://www.squidoo.com/hotelbuddy/

It's kind of like what I want to do - build websites using other content but with your own special flavour. It's great that they've already added in the monetising part of the equation so you don;t have to pretend that the site is some personal experiment. Just get on and make some money.

Or you can, like I have done, elect to have the money donated to charity. Great idea. Not sure they'll make too much off mine though.

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Thursday, August 02, 2007

100 Top Hotel sites

One of the blogs I read regularly is THE BOOT by Tim Hughes.

Recently Tim posted an article on a site that claims to rank the top 100 hotel sites.
If you love a list of hotel sites, you'll like (and hate) TOP 100 HOTEL SITES

Using one of my SEO test sites I set up a link as the TOp 100 requested and lo-and-behold I'm at number 309:
http://www.top100hotel.com/www.bellhop.co.nz.html

So a site about New Zealand Hotels is the 309th most popular hotel site on the planet.

It's even more popular than rooms-manager.com (Number 312) which describes itself as:

"ROOMS-MANAGER.COM, part of Priceline.com (Nasdaq:PCLN) is Europe’s leading online hotel reservations agency by room nights sold, attracting over 15 million unique visitors each month via the Internet from both leisure and business markets worldwide.

Established in 1996, ROOMS-MANAGER.COM offers competitive rates for any type of property, ranging from small independent hotels through to a five star luxury. The site is available in 15 languages and offers over 30,000 hotels in more than 8,000 destinations."




Update 4 Sept 2007: I'm now number 205, rising fast.

Rating: 3550 points* (was 3650 so someone has removed me ...)

*amount mentions of word 'www.bellhop.co.nz' on the other websites

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Yahoo site explorer

I've heard that the Google links: report is unreliable so I've been playing with Yahoo site explorer to see who is linking to me:

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com: www.hotelbuddy.us

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com : www.hotelbuddy.co.uk

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com: www.bellhop.com.au

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com: www.bellhop.co.nz

I think the results are more useful than Google's equivalent in the webmaster tools beacuse this lets you drill down into the results and also see when a page was last crawled.

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Sunday, July 22, 2007

Home on the range

Poor Wyoming is the last State when listed alphabetically, so I decided to get that done now so it can start to be spidered.

It has sopme nice sounding counties:
Big Horn
Sweetwater county
or how about a visit the town of Thermoplois in Hot Springs County

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Tuesday, July 17, 2007

tools

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Region and county pages

I've added a bit more info to these pages and added a width tag to the images so that the page loads faster.

Below are a few county pages from the US:
New London County Hotels, Connecticut
Bannock County Hotels, Idaho
Baldwin County Hotels, Ababama

and the UK:
Bedfordshire Hotels, England
Angus Hotels, Scotland
Cardiganshire / Ceredigion Hotels, Wales

I like how the Welsh regions also have the Welsh name.

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